Volvo dealership is really booked up
Ah, those Volvo drivers. To some political theorists, they are their own overeducated voting bloc. To some cultural critics, they are those Chardonnay-swilling, latte-sipping, “Masterpiece Theatre”-watching elitists.
To Edward P. Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Known World,” a brutal tale of black slave owners in the 1850s, they were something else on a recent evening. His audience.
Jones arrived in a midnight blue Volvo limo at Don Beyer Volvo in suburban Falls Church, Va. The showroom floor had been cleared of the sporty new S40 sedans and sleek XC90 SUVs. In their place, about 125 Volvo drivers sat in white chairs, riveted, as Jones read.
They were, of course, drinking chardonnay.
“I’ve read you’re a very private person,” one driver asked. “How did you get out here? Did they promise you a car?”
Jones offered a shy smile. “I don’t drive.”
The reading at the car dealership may have been one of the stranger marriages of highbrow art and the mass market. Jones said afterward that when he got the invitation, he figured he’d be appearing at a school or in a conference room. “I’ve never been in a car dealership before, not having a car,” mused Jones, who lives in Washington. “But I used to pass by here on the bus.”
He never imagined holding forth in the display room, he said, his listeners exposed to the night through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows and bright showroom lights. “I wonder how they got the cars out.”
It was Don Beyer’s idea. Beyer, a former Virginia lieutenant governor who co-owns the franchise with his brother, Mike, said he had wanted to have an author series for nearly a decade. And to his mind, the Jones reading was only the first.
“Everyone’s surprised when I tell them,” Beyer said. “But when you think about it, it seems so logical, too. We’ve got customers that are very well read.”
Volvo drivers possess, according to national surveys, more graduate degrees than any other group of drivers. They’re not all liberals, as the stereotype would have it -- Beyer said he had seen an equal number of Bush and Kerry stickers on the lot. But they all tend to support the arts. And they did also drink Merlot.
“Our clients are not drawn to loud, obnoxious TV ads or big print ads in the classifieds,” Mike Beyer said as he took photos of Jones reading about slave whippings, subjugation and chains against a backdrop of a giant blue Volvo sign. “They want to be part of something, part of a culture.”
Added Don Beyer, “I don’t know, if I were a Chevy dealer, we’d be having Edward P. Jones tonight.”
From the days of the Medicis and earlier, the ones with money have always supported the ones with artistic talent. They just haven’t done it right on the factory floor, so to speak.
“I thought this request was a little odd, but they didn’t balk at the price,” Jones’ lecture agent Judy Lubershane said. Don Beyer said Jones received about $5,000 for the evening.
Jones read quietly, looking up only occasionally to poke his glasses back up his nose. He took questions: Did he ever eat dirt, as he wrote about so convincingly? No. How did he choose his topic? He read a line in a footnote in some textbook in college. And how did it feel to win the Pulitzer? Nice.
Jones may have come to read to car owners, but he would never be one, he said. He got his driver’s license only to be able to buy beer and wine in Charlottesville, Va. And he was 32 at the time. “I like to sit in the passenger seat,” he said. “I like to look around.”
